Why this matters
Across the Northern, Savannah, North East, Upper East and Upper West regions, a great deal of data work happens in communities, not offices. NGOs, research organisations, health programmes and government schemes send teams to villages to ask households about farming, water, health, schooling and income. Someone has to design those surveys, run them on phones, clean the results and keep respondents' information safe. Those tasks appear in many M&E, research assistant and data officer adverts, and they are a realistic first door into data work for someone in the north.
The life of a field survey
Every survey follows roughly the same path:
- Purpose. What decision or report will this data feed? An NGO might need to know how many farmers adopted a new seed variety.
- Design. Write the questions and decide who to ask, which is called sampling.
- Build. Turn the questionnaire into a phone form with checks, using a tool such as KoboToolbox or ODK.
- Collect. Enumerators visit households, ask questions in the local language and record answers, often offline.
- Clean. Download the results and fix duplicates, impossible values and inconsistent spellings.
- Protect. Store the data securely, remove names where they are not needed, and respect consent.